Groupon Sales Team Files Class-Action Suit - <AUTHOR> http://paidcontent.org/article/419-more-bad-news-for-groupon-sales-team-files-class-action-suit/ <comment><USER2> _suddenly unpopular with both users and investors..._

The first rule of bad journalism is to confuse the first and second derivatives. Groupon is enormously popular with users and investors--it's just not the most popular it's ever been. Yipit's fairly recent data indicate that while the daily deal market contracted slightly over the summer, but Groupon shrank more slowly than LivingSocial ( [http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/25/yipits-daily-deal-report- gr...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/25/yipits-daily-deal-report-groupon-up- livingsocial-down-travel-deals-take-off/) ).

In "Fooled by Randomness," Taleb points out that the more frequently you measure results, the more random they are. Second-by-second, Warren Buffett is losing money just about half the time.

Groupon obviously has problems, and LivingSocial is executing amazingly well, but it should be laughable to call them "unpopular" rather than "less massively popular than at their peak a couple months ago," in the same way that you wouldn't call someone "poor" because they moved down a spot in the _Forbes 400_.

<comment><USER3> I think the word "unpopular," in the context of the article, is referring to people's perceptions of the company's business practices and brand. Not so much to the size or engagement of the userbase. I might be wrong, but that was my interpretation.

(It's "unpopular" right now because it's come under a lot of heat in the press; perhaps "embattled" would be a more accurate word).

<comment><USER4> And neither would be accurate. Most users, both businesses and customers, are wildly happy with group on.

<comment><USER5> Citations, please.

Without knowledge about their churn rates, especially in comparison with their competitors, it is not obvious either way. There are also users who still receive the daily emails because they did not bother to cancel the subscription, but rarely look at them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This had to be sort of expected. Groupon has grown fast and they turned down the acquisition offer from Google. This suggests that they were messaging new employees "We're taking this one all the way to IPO." And then proceed to ply new employees with stock and spreadsheets showing great returns. Many people at a 'startup' understand that they are sacrificing a bit of pay or benefits now, for a potentially much larger upside later. And Groupon certainly fit the mold.

Now Groupon pulls back on their IPO plans, folks who had been "taking one for the company" feel cheated because they have a harder time imagining huge returns than they did before. (On a related note I've had this issue with calling options and stock 'compensation' in the past because really until someone buys your paper it really isn't something you can spend) So the sales folks turn around and say well if we're not going to get that money we foolishly believed would be dripping out of the IPO spigot, they're going to ask for it in cash.

I really wonder if they would have crossed this threshold (suing) if the 'big cheeses' in the company hadn't decided to do a huge funding round to pay themselves off. (another way to convert 'potential' in earnings into cash).

</comment><comment><USER7> Completely misleading title - it should read 'Groupon Salesperson Files Class- Action Suit'. You only need one person to file a lawsuit, class-action or otherwise, and there's no indication in any of the docs that any other members of Groupon's sales team are involved.

From the filing (in Justia - [http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district- courts/illinoi...](http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district- courts/illinois/ilndce/1:2011cv05685/259040/1/)) it looks to my completely- not-an-expert-eyes like Groupon's mistake here was not treating its salaried employees like salaried employees - on rare occasions it gave them overtime pay, and on the attached pay stub hours and an hourly rate ($15.62) are clearly recorded. Whoops.

<comment><USER8> If that's true, it's a pretty common error. Most tech companies operate under the (usually valid) assumption that their employees are all salaried and exempt from OT comp. But it's usually to the benefit of all those employees to be classified "hourly", and theres a bunch of innocuous things employers can do to make that happen.

More common than breaking people's status with overtime payments: threatening to dock pay for coming in late or missing days.

<comment><USER9> California, a few years ago, cracked down on this. Entry level programmers are not exempt. I think because they lack responsibility or skill or somesuch. I found this out only when I had to start filling out time sheets. I became exempt again after a raise, apparently there's some salary floor at which point they assume you have to have responsibility because you're paid too much not to.

FWIW, CA appears to exempt outside sales but not inside sales, so probably all groupon salespeople in CA have a case.

<comment><USER8> This is shocking to me. Are you sure? Being non-exempt is a big deal. And it cuts both ways: it also means your employer can dock you when you show up late. Are you sure about this? Are junior devs literally punching timecards?

<comment><USER10> I think this is it:

[http://www.management-advantage.com/products/overtime- exempt...](http://www.management-advantage.com/products/overtime-exempt.html)

 _1\. "Minimum Salary Test" The minimum salary level for exempt white collar employees according to A.B. 60 is "no less than two times the state minimum wage for full time employment." "White collar" exemptions refer to the executive, administrative, learned professional, creative professional, computer employee, and outside sales exemptions specified in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as amended effective 8/23/2004. Computing the California minimum salary level for January 2009 we do the following: Current minimum wage = $8.00 per hour X 2,080 hours in a year = $16,640, multiplied by 2 times the minimum wage = $33,280_

<comment><USER9> You must already be exempt for that test to apply. It doesn't mean anyone making $16/hr becomes exempt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A side note - I have been supremely impressed with Groupon's customer service. Emails personally returned within minutes and no problem refunding groupons I no longer wanted.

<comment><USER12> My experience has been the opposite. Despite the fact that this blog post from Mason...

[http://www.groupon.com/blog/cities/groupon-organizes- class-a...](http://www.groupon.com/blog/cities/groupon-organizes-class-action- against-itself/)

...suggests that Groupon's "completely open return policy" can be used, rather than a lawsuit, to get a refund on an expired Groupon, that's not true. They won't give such refunds, and their customer service responses have advised that the Groupon in question may still be usable "if state law applies". So rather than providing "unbelievable" customer service, or even following through on the refund promises of their CEO, they're doing the absolute minimum required by law.

So in the single interaction where I could independently test whether what Mason touts is true, it was not. As a result, I don't put much weight in anything Groupon claims.

<comment><USER11> Well they just refunded my 4 helicopter ride Groupons for a total of $596 that would have expired next week. If I let a Groupon expire though, I wouldn't bitch about not getting a refund, no matter the state law.

<comment><USER12> And I would have requested the refund just before expiration... if I'd known the Groupon Promise and the Mason blog post were misleading. (Actually, I probably wouldn't have bought the Groupon in the first place. I bought it right _after_ being impressed with the Mason claim, and thinking, "what a smart policy, it takes all will-I-use-it-or-not anxiety out of buying a Groupon".)

But I trusted them, and was burned. Miniscule amount of money, but now I know that they strategically deceive about the refund policy, so I won't be trusting them again.

I'm OK if a particular business wants to grind out their margins from fine print, 'breakage', and other gotchas. I'm all for _caveat emptor_. They could change the "Groupon Promise" to read "If your Groupon experience ever lets you down, let us know and we'll refund your purchase. Period. Except for expirations." And Mason could fix his blog post so that it doesn't portray the 'completely open return policy' as the preferred remedy for people with expired Groupons.

I just hate the act that they've got Nordstrom/Bed-Bath- Beyond/Costco/Zappos/etc-style customer service, when they don't. Together with the other reports of dodgy advertising claims, encouraging businesses to raise their prices pre-Groupon to inflate discount percentages, and pushy sales practices, it gives me the impression that they've ranked 'honesty' far below 'growth at all costs'.

<comment><USER13> Have you tried redeeming the groupon for the money you paid at the merchant? From Groupon's FAQ:

What happens if my Groupon's promotional value expires?

All is not lost! If your Groupon's promotional value expires, you can always redeem it for the amount paid. For more information about expiration dates and voucher values, read our Terms of Sale

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting tidbit from the article that I did not know:

"a federal judge in San Francisco permitted a tour operator to proceed with a merchant class action lawsuit over alleged false advertising"

leads to

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/24/us-groupon- lawsuit...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/24/us-groupon-lawsuit- idUSTRE77N6NY20110824)

</comment><comment><USER15> To summarize the situation (someone please correct me if I am wrong?):

1\. Files for IPO

2\. ASCOI (Adjusted Segmented Consolidated Operating Income) falls under scrutiny from public & SEC

3\. VP of Global Communications resigns

4\. Internal Memo "leaked" to major press outlets

5\. SEC investigates said memo

6\. Sales Team files Class-Action suit

Wow.

<comment><USER16> 7\. Cancels IPO

8\. Insolvent in 6 months

9\. Layoffs

10\. Lawsuits

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I never really understood Groupon's super high valuation. I think they grew too fast, and possibly needed to cut corners to sustain their growth. Can anyone explain what the appeal has been for investors?

<comment><USER3> _"Can anyone explain what the appeal has been for investors?"_

The usual shtick about how growth trumps all other considerations. "It's the fastest growing company ever!" "Who cares if COGS is absurdly high / users aren't buying / revenues have been overstated / etc? Fundamentals don't apply when they're growing this quickly!" "This is a winner-take-all market, like with Amazon in the 90s!"

I remember reading endless defenses of Groupon's business model on SeekingAlpha in the months leading up to the IPO filing. People would trot out all sorts of highly sophisticated models and theories to demonstrate how Groupon was pretty much exempt from the laws of thermodynamics. I'm too young to remember if the same pitch was used for the Dotcoms of the '90s bubble, but the logic sounds eerily familiar.

<comment><USER18> "This is a winner-take-all market, like with Amazon in the 90s!"

Amazon is often pointed to as a company that was doubted much and then succeeded. What isn't talked about as much, in addition to the fact that there were many more companies that went bust than hit, is the fact that Amazon lost 3 billion before it became profitable. (Source: financials on Amazon investor site). The fact is Amazon should have failed and the critics were right more than they were wrong.

"I'm too young to remember if the same pitch was used for the Dotcoms of the '90s bubble"

Same idea. Making people think they are stupid if they don't "get it". I know otherwise smart people who lost $100,000 on dot com stocks that they had no business in back then.

<comment><USER19> > Amazon lost 3 billion before it became profitable

Where exactly did they find 3 billion to lose? How did Jeff Bezos manage to convince investors to give up so much cash? I'm really surprised about this

<comment><USER18> Taking only 1 year as an example, 2001 Amazon had $444 million of accounts payable, $305 million of current liabilities (some other things...) and 2.1 billion of long term debt.

So, in 2001 the total current liabilities and ltd was over 3 billion dollars.

So they borrowed - they issued bonds as well as used other types financing. The interest payments for that year are actually pretty low in relation to the debt, interest expense for 2001 was only about 139 million.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I see Groupon's rise and fall as similar to MySpace. _traffic for rival deal site Living Social rose 27%_ Maybe Living Social is the Facebook in this comparison.

<comment><USER21> In my world it definitely is. They are MUCH more local for those of us living in the city (Denver in this case) than Groupon which typically has deals that are 20 miles from my house.

For me and my social circle, Living Social is something we consistently use. Most people I know have actually unsubscribed from Groupons mailing list.

Anecdotal for sure, but I think there might be at least a kernel of trend in there somewhere:)

<comment><USER22> This brings up an interesting point. Perhaps hyper-locality (ie, zipcode or even neighborhood granualar offers) is the full-paradigm shift that will revolutionize this Groupon concept.

Social sizzle like what LivingSocial adds I think is nice, but forgettable (no one I know has gotten/used the "free deal" group buy).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would recommend to groupon instead of forcing businesses to give deals. Set up a system that has the users bid to spend a certain amount for a good or service. Once you have enough people agreeing to it, there's no way a business would turn it down. You could cut the work force in half and let the users have control of where they get deals. That's my 2 cents.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is really sad. In my limited understanding of business, I always thought that Groupon's greatest asset was it's sales team. Who else has a sales team that can hit so many small businesses across the us so fast. I was hoping that they would leverage this asset in more ways than just selling advertisement.

</comment><comment><USER25> They should have taken that google offer.

<comment><USER26> I wonder if they couldn't, what if Google took the offer back after they saw their financials.

<comment><USER27> I'd wager it was something in that neighborhood. Either google withdrew the offer or groupon knew that google would not go ahead with the offer after seeing their financials and hence decided to decline it. The offer however made them seem really hot though. Hey, if google wants them why shouldn't we regular folks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Poor business fundamentals create poor business outcomes. Groupon needs to reevaluate itself, and if it must, downsize and regrow with a better product. Basically, Groupon needs to figure this out - or everyone else will - and it won't be good for Groupon.

</comment><comment><USER29> The turning point for Groupon was that awful, offensive Superbowl advertisment.

</comment><comment><USER30> a boom needs a webvan

</comment><comment><USER31> Almost starting to feel bad for Groupon - what else could possibly go wrong? The only thing that seems left is insolvency.

<comment><USER32> There has GOT to be a great case study there once all the dust/ashes settle.

<comment><USER31> "How To Almost Go Public By Making 50 cents for every $1 spent." - HBS Case (2012)

<comment><USER32> ... or "When Google offers you $6B, take it."

Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.

<comment><USER33> They were pigs, not hogs. The original investors walked away with a majority of the final round of funding. I don't think Google's $6bn offer would have allowed them to do that. The people left holding this junk are now trying to pawn it off on the public...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My spidey senses are tingling that this is some sort of sabotage... too many things are falling apart too quickly.

<comment><USER34> So much for " (-1, Disagree)"

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Shit meet fan.</comment>


The cubicle gym: How I used science to make my work day freakishly healthy - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/11/12/7186667/office-fitness-exercises-stretches <comment><USER2> This matches some of the concepts I've got from the book "The 4-Hour Body" from Tim Ferriss. The fast-exercise stimulation also tells your body not to store energy into fat, which is one of the principles of the Slow Carb Diet.

</comment><comment><USER3> He didn't really "use science to make [his] work day freakishly healthy." He got a treadmill desk, stopped eating so much, and did little bodyweight exercises during the day.

That's just being healthier.</comment>


Show HN: StreamingPivot – pivot and visualize CSV data purely in the browser - <AUTHOR> http://streamingpivot.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Creator here, happy to answer any questions. The website is based on three great open-source libraries - Perspective, Datalib and DC.js and does a bit of plumbing to reuse the wasm speed of Perspective for dealing with the data. Data does not leave the browser. Supported file size is limited by how much memory allocation browsers allow per tab, that can be overridden if needed but typically up to 1-2gb should work.

It's preliminary work, but if there is interest and is useful to someone I would iterate on it. Drop a line at hello at streamingpivot dot com for questions and requests.

</comment><comment><USER2> I import a small CSV file and nothing happens - screen stays exactly the same. ? Using Chrome 6.2

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it happening on each screen - pivot/charts/stats and what does the Chrome Dev console say? You could try to uncheck the "First line is a header" in the settings (cog image on the right) might help if you don't have a header and the first line contains strange symbols. Feel free to drop me a line at hello at streamingpivot dot com, happy to continue the discussion there.

<comment><USER3> Same issue here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any chance you can send me a small sample of the csv file?

<comment><USER3> Actually it was disk io stats pulled from a grafana graph fed by sysstats/telegraf. Unfortunately it is from a corporate env so that's a no no. But If you give me a couple of days I can do it from my own services.

<comment><AUTHOR> The issue was the mime type not being set to text/csv when ingesting, could you maybe give it another run?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes - <AUTHOR> http://www.mahdiyusuf.com/post/9947002105/most-pressed-keys-and-programming-syntaxes <comment><USER2> I photoshopped this really quick for to compare ruby on Dvorak and Qwerty. [https://img.skitch.com/20110908-q24qths9k4u6438wpd989qreci.j...](https://img.skitch.com/20110908-q24qths9k4u6438wpd989qreci.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Nice. This is the most interesting question about Dvorak, to me.

Everyone I know who recommends Dvorak is a programmer. And I'm more than content with my comfort and speed typing English; the pain of slowing down to type brackets all the time when programming is more of a pain point for me.

So with this in mind, it's interesting to note that Dvorak has moved the quote key to a slightly less favourable location, and basically banished paren/bracket. Not a solution for my pain point!

<comment><USER4> I personally use a variant of Programmer's Dvorak. Brackets and various symbols are placed where you usually see numbers, while you have to press shift to access numbers. I think that on a proper Programmer's Dvorak Caps Lock should cause shift to be in effect on the numbers/symbols buttons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> it'd be interesting to see these heatmaps in some sort of normalized way. for example, 'e' is the most common letter in english, so its the most commonly used letter in these programming languages. it'd be very interesting to see, for example, this heatmap with the intensities divided by each letter's frequency of use in the English language, or across a large set of data including a lot of different programming languages

<comment><USER6> Just did it for 28000 C files. Here's the results:

        a  0.772163
        b  1.2679
        c  1.78209
        d  1.1195
        e  0.881398
        f  1.47252
        g  0.924242
        h  0.358954
        i  1.06756
        j  0.835313
        k  1.41458
        l  0.981729
        m  1.08955
        n  0.9156
        o  0.73849
        p  1.74468
        q  4.2497
        r  1.21577
        s  1.05023
        t  1.03627
        u  1.2967
        v  1.77662
        w  0.396003
        x  13.7292
        y  0.47566
        z  3.78748

The numbers are (relative frequency in C) / (relative frequency in English). So "b" is slightly more common in C than English, but "w" is a lot more common in English than C.

The raw counts for symbol characters:

        _  22890057
        ,  10895692
        )  10749798
        (  10745839
        *  9211904
        ;  8187969
        -  6628768
        =  5878296
        >  4428291
        /  3468260
        .  3011078
        {  2212412
        }  2211783
        "  2120264
        &  1647188
        :  1032587
        +  962554
        #  909859
        [  889538
        ]  888722
        <  839910
        |  643903
        %  583092
        !  561462
        \  540456
        '  454201
        @  131199
        ?  112488
        ~  84629
        ^  19064
        $  17922
        `  7272
        [space] 74199965

<comment><USER7> What would be interesting here would be a difference analysis or regression giving the preference for any given key in a given language. E.g.: '|' is highly predictive of shell, '$' of perl, '()' for lisp. Might be fun to do in R.

<comment><USER8> I really need to do reading and research on this, but I'm pretty sure that's what Hidden Markov Models are for. You could watch a webpage go from HTML to javascript and back!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's interesting to note that a big reason ( ) dominate in Lisp here is that pg adopts the FP habit of short var names. If anything this is probably just a measure of the tendency to use long vs short name - mainstream OO practice encourages the former. It would be interesting to rerun the heatmap for Lisp with a typical CLOS program. I think you'll find that ( ) no longer dominate.

EDIT: And in fact here's a heatmap of core.logic (1K LOC) which is fairly OO- ish in its design - <http://twitpic.com/6hwj88>. ( ) are strong but do not dominate everything.

UPDATE: And here's a 1.4K LOC Clojure program, core.match <http://twitpic.com/6hwo8w/full>. ( ) again do not dominate.

</comment><comment><USER10> This just graphically displays what I whine about most of the time. Why does my pinky has to do most the work? My pinky is pretty short and all the pinky movements are awkward. It considerably slows down my code typing speed.

I wonder If there would be another keyboard layout specially made for programmers. If you look at it you'll see that most of it has a similar pattern.

<comment><USER11> It is funny that you should mention it, because I have spent a lot of time finding keyboard layouts more suitable for programing.

In the end I settled on the programmer dvorak layout. It is basically a standard dvorak keyboard but with the special keys you need to program moved to easier locations (and the dvorak keyboard itself uses the homerow much more efficiently, so there is much less strain on your fingers and your wrists).

<comment><USER10> I have thought about switching to Dvorak, it's hard to find from where I live. I'd love to know what model or brand you settled for.

<comment><USER12> If you mean buying a hardware keyboard with dvorak letters, then don't. If you learn to touch type (and there's no point switching to Dvorak if you don't intend to) then you don't need to look at your keyboard, indeed being able to will only teach you bad habits.

Print a paper copy of the key layout to pin next to your monitor when starting out and use a typing tutor like _gtypist_ to train yourself instead.

<comment><USER10> I have no problem typing without looking. Problem as I mentioned above, it is difficult to type with my pinky. It is kind of short (Not oddly short, just that I have shorter fingers than average) and it's awkward. That's what slows me down.

So I'm looking for a layout which makes my other fingers work more.

<comment><USER12> It sounds like a smaller and/or curved keyboard might be a physical alternative, rather than learn a new layout e.g. the expensive Kinesis contoured devices.

<http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/contoured.htm>

<comment><USER13> Funny you mention the Kinesis, which can switch between qwerty and dvorak with a keypress, without you having to consult the OS about it. (great if you can't configure the computer you're using)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tomh- Lisp: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2196687/lisp-keystrokes.png>

<comment><USER14> My experience with Lisp is minimal, and I'm a Vim guy, so I may be totally wrong about this, but...

Doen't nearly all serious Lisp developers use Emacs? And doesn't Emacs have piles of shortcuts for wrapping/unwrapping/manipulating s-expressions? I'd imagine that the resulting number of parens is wildly different than the number originally typed.

Can any experienced Lispers comment on this? Where can I find a cheat sheet of such shortcuts?

<comment><USER15> Not an experienced Lisper, but yes, you're right. If you made heatmaps of the original keystrokes, for a Lisper using Paredit, there would likely be a decent highlight on the open paren but almost nothing on the close, as Paredit inserts parens in pairs. Hitting ( inserts ().

I don't think Paredit isn't included in Emacs, but here's the relavent page on the Emacs Wiki: <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit> and here's a cheatsheet: <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PareditCheatsheet>

There's also something similar for Vim, or at least something bundled with slimv, which is more than just Paredit (supporting something like SLIME) <http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2531>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I looked at the heatmaps, then looked at my keyboard. The keys with rubbed out labels nearly match his findings 100%. My 'N' isn't (only because the key is slightly larger than my other keys). Other than that, he is spot on.

<comment><USER17> I'm curious, why do you have a large N key?

<comment><USER18> Ergonomic style split keyboard, I'm guessing?

[http://www.compkeyboard.com/uploadpic/Microsoft%20Natural%20...](http://www.compkeyboard.com/uploadpic/Microsoft%20Natural%20Keyboard%204000-2.jpg)

<comment><USER16> Yeah, that's the one. I use this for my office keyboard and a Logitech G510 at home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Clearly ObjC programmers are the only ones, who comment their code responsibly.

<comment><USER20> (or have to ;) )

<comment><USER21> If you code responsibly in ObjC there's no need to write comments. Therefore, if someone "has to" comment ObjC code there's something wrong with their practices.

The same holds for almost any language, but in ObjC that's just natural.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Would like to see a Dvorak version of this.

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting to note the difference between C and C++ with regards to the '*' and '&' keys.

I know there is a lot of raw pointer and address usage in C, but I'm surprised at how little these keys show up in C++.

It's good to see that people are taking advantage of smart pointers ;)

(It's subtle though, so I could be reading too much into it).

<comment><USER23> Seems odd that < and > are said to be used more in C than in C++ (templates).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> 4 of my haskell files put into heatmap. One of them is an applicative-functor- style use of attoparsec, which tends to have more punctuation than normal haskell code. Even with the frequent use of :'s, $'s and ()'s, the alphanumeric keystrokes dominate the input.

<http://fayr.am/9xkE>

You can compare this to the Lorum Ipsum text map and see its only slightly different: <http://fayr.am/9yk6>

I dunno what that means or what sort of value judgements it drives, but it's pretty different from the other heatmaps.

<comment><USER25> And on Dvorak, all of the yellow letters except the "R" are on the home row.... (R is on the O.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This really needs to take into account modifier keys (in particular, shift).

</comment><comment><USER27> _Whitespace hasn't been taken into consideration (tabs and spaces) which would have been a cool thing to see._

I think if that was included this would be a lot more useful. Is there a reason it wasn't?

<comment><USER28> Different editors take different amounts of effort to insert whitespace.

<comment><USER29> Still without whitespaces, i have to look at the python heatmap a little differently..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The javascript image shows limited to no usage on the $ key, Doesn't say a lot for jQuery usage.

<comment><USER31> In the codebase here we use 'jQuery' instead of '$'.

<comment><USER32> Ditto. If you pull in multiple plugins or additional frameworks (for some reason, we mix YUI with jquery), the $() notation can become broken, and you have to explicitly call jQuery().

<comment><USER33> Unless you put all your code in a big closure to make a correct $ in function scope:

      (function ($)
      {

      }) (jQuery);

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Here's one for Smalltalk. It's based on my .changes file - about 200K LOC, with all the lines containing '----' and $! removed. What's left is, I think, stuff that actually got typed into a browser.

You can definitely see $:, but otherwise it looks pretty much like English.

</comment><comment><USER35> Has anyone done this for programmer Dvorak yet? I guess I'm just looking for validation..

</comment><comment><USER36> If anyone cares: I just added the DVORAK keyboard layout to the keyboard heatmap and open sourced the code. Here is the repo URL: <https://github.com/pa7/Keyboard-Heatmap>

</comment><comment><USER37> apropos of the brainfuck reference earlier today, here is a brainfuck interpreter, written in brainfuck, visualized through the keyboard heatmap.

<http://i.imgur.com/lSDYJ.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER9> Just to drive the point home, Clojure's core.clj is 6,500+ lines of Lisp, funny enough, _parens do not dominate_ \- <http://twitpic.com/6hwt28/full>.

<comment><USER38> Well, there is a very good reason for this: Clojure tries to reduce the number of parentheses by substituting other characters, namely square brackets []. For example:

        ; Common Lisp
        (defun add (x y) (+ x y))
        ; Scheme
        (define (add x y) (+ x y))
        ; Clojure
        (defn add [x y] (+ x y))

Also, Clojure eliminates some parentheses that are used in other Lisps:

        ; Common Lisp and Scheme
        (cond ((> x 0) 1)
              ((= x 0) 0)
              (t -1))
        ; Clojure
        (cond (> x 0) 1
              (= x 0) 0
              :else -1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The title is misleading. They just extracted character frequencies from source files which fail to capture 'Delete', 'Shift', 'Ctrl', 'Alt', etc keys.

Even has Paul Graham name at the end, as if 'Look, this is totally legit!'

<comment><USER40> Well, Ctrl and Alt aren't related to the programming language (more the editor or OS) and neither is Delete.

Shift is, but that could have (should have IMO) been extracted from the character frequencies in the source files...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Of course there's also the missing shortcut keys. For example, Java projects using an IDE would probably have crtl-space be the most frequently pressed keys (autocomplete).

</comment><comment><USER42> The problem with this is that you can't tell the difference between numerals and symbols or even worse between two symbols in the same key (such as '_' and '-').

</comment><comment><USER43> Interesting. It seems strange that Javascript and Ruby seem to use 'r' significantly less than other languages. I have no idea why that would be.

</comment><comment><USER44> It appears that it just scans source files, not actual key presses. I barely touch the parenthesis keys when programming Lisp for example.

</comment><comment><USER45> Perl programmers do seem to comment a lot... the "#" looks almost as heavily used as the "$", which is mandatory for variables.

</comment><comment><USER10> In reality though enclosing glyphs will not be very well balanced. Opening brackets will be typed more than closing brackets.

</comment><comment><USER46> vim and emacs would be fun too :oP

</comment><comment><USER47> based on my visual observation, apart from lisp, python seems to skew furthest away from average. Its heatmap is much cooler, with less extremes. I wonder why.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'd love to see a keyboard layout based on data like this.

<comment><USER49> It already exists in terms of a more logical layout for faster typing of many latin-based languages. Instead of QUERTY keyboard, it's called the Dvorak layout and is really common in certain circles and places - I believe that in OS X you can switch to this alternative layout pretty easily if you're interested in learning a faster way of typing. More info here: <http://atmac.org/dvorak-keyboard-layout-switching>

<comment><USER12> There's also some programmer versions of Dvorak, that make the punctuation more accessible too (by demoting numerals to needing the shift-key to be held):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard#Prog...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard#Programmer_Dvorak)

Just as Dvorak was based on letter usage, this is based on examining large bodies of code just like the heatmaps in the OP.

<comment><USER11> It is a bit more than just switching the keys and numbers around - it uses the information from the code it examined to intelligently put the special chars that are used most often were they are easiest to access.

And yes if you wonder, it is awesome to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I bet the backspace key is used the most.

</comment><comment><USER51> time for a programmer keyboard layout? "ASERTNIOL" in the middle line would be good for several langs

</comment><comment><USER52> The most pressed keys are ⌘ (or CTRL), C, and V.

</comment><comment><USER53> Doesn't PHP use a colon at the end of every line? WTF?

<comment><USER54> No.

It uses a semicolon to delimit statements within blocks, but (afaik) placing each statement inside its own <?php ... ?> tag would be valid.

There's also the alternative syntax[1], which is mostly used for templating these days, which looks like

        <?php if ($foo): ?>
         ... html ...
        <?php endif; ?>

and is probably the only place other than a ternary operator that might conceivably end a line with a colon.

[1] [http://php.net/manual/en/control-structures.alternative- synt...](http://php.net/manual/en/control-structures.alternative-syntax.php)

<comment><USER53> but the <?php ?> don't seem to be used too much on this heatmap.

<comment><USER55> As php code gets more structured, its moving towards MVC frameworks where php tags are used sparingly in the views. (they are a fast way to make spaghetti code)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TSA lets loaded gun on plane - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5714865/the-tsa-let-a-loaded-gun-get-on-an-airplane?skyline=true&s=i

<comment><USER2> The interesting thing about this to me is how it highlights that by setting up a process we introduce a set of possibilities that have different probabilities of happening. Given enough iterations some possibilities are virtually guaranteed. If we make planes and fly them, some will crash. If we build bridges and use them, some will fall down unexpectedly. Not to take anything away from these endeavors or imply that we should be Luddites. It just fascinates me to see how processes make consequences (most of which are nowhere near as easy to foresee as loaded weapons being carried, unwittingly or otherwise, on public airplanes).</comment>


How transactional DDL in your queries can kill your throughput. Postmortem - <AUTHOR> https://www.joyent.com/blog/manta-postmortem-7-27-2015 <comment><AUTHOR> src [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4pshdj/how_the...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4pshdj/how_the_postgresql_transaction_wraparound_can/)

[https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/maintenance.h...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/maintenance.html)</comment>


Rokid Glass 2 detects temperatures of 200 people within 1 minute from 3 meters - <AUTHOR> https://www.rokid.com/en/rokid-glass-2/ <comment><USER2> Detecting their temperature doesn't help, until they're already symptomatic enough that they're likely to be staying at home — or in a hospital.</comment>


Four Pownce Invites - <AUTHOR>

First come first served, etc. etc.<p>(honestly not really sure if this thing is worth playing with, but I've got 'em if you want 'em) <comment><AUTHOR> Ok these are out the door. I have a few more here if anybody would like them.

</comment><comment><USER2> sgoraya at gmail.com

thx!

</comment><comment><USER3> firstname.lastname@example.com

thanks.

</comment><comment><USER4> email@example.com

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER5> kyle.bolton at gmail</comment>


Snowden: Can you hear me now? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/648890134243487744 <comment><USER2> This provides a rather nice extra punchline to Stewart Lee's joke about Twitter being a state surveillance agency staffed by gullible volunteers.</comment>


Does Stack Exchange really want to conflate newbies with women/people of color? - <AUTHOR> https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366665/does-stack-exchange-really-want-to-conflate-newbies-with-women-people-of-color <comment><USER2> It seems like a part of a larger trend going on in our industry right now. And it doesn't look good</comment>


Poe's the Masque of the Red Death - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masque_of_the_Red_Death <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_the_Late_Edgar_A...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_the_Late_Edgar_Allan_Poe/Volume_1/The_Masque_of_the_Red_Death)</comment>


The Long Haul: One Year of Solitude on America's Highways - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a40157/long-haul-year-trucking-america/ <comment><USER2> I'm really looking forward to seeing long haul trucking automated. A few of the big brands are working on the systems, so I don't see why we won't see it on the roads in the next 5 years. Some of these drivers will shift into more of the last-mile work (manually driving a truck from the highway through the city / town to the factories) but most of them will be out of a job.

<comment><USER3> _see it on the roads in the next 5 years_

Nah. At least not the way you put it, that most drivers will be out of a job. I think that could take closer to 50 years than to 5 years.

Much more quickly, the automation could be doing the actual long distance "driving" (such as maintaining lanes and distance), while the human driver will sit back and supervise.

Without a human present, the first automated truck that "pulls a Wal-mart"[1] and wipes out a bunch of cars and people will result in the whole thing getting shut down. The human has to be there for liability reasons if for no others. It would be very hard for a company get away with blaming the computer after an injury accident.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2015/08/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2015/08/12/shocking-images-of-tracy-morgan-crash-in-report-blaming- driver-of-wal-mart-truck/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This guy writes well, he didn't sleep thru journalism school. He's also a bit of a student of history, I enjoyed his exposition of the changes the trucking industry has gone thru.

</comment><comment><USER4> After reading about automated trucking progress, I remembered this article: [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map- the-most-common-job-in-every-state) This can't end well.</comment>


Your new smartphone is probably not as good as your phone from a decade ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/telecoms/12029524/Why-your-new-600-smartphone-is-probably-not-as-good-as-your-phone-from-a-decade-ago.html <comment><USER2> I've suspected this for years now. I hate talking on the phone now -- I always feel like I'm straining to understand people.</comment>


Email IP Leak Test - <AUTHOR> http://emailleaktest.com/

<comment><USER2> Another site to test email IP leaks: [http://emailipleak.com/](http://emailipleak.com/)

Aside from basic IP leaks, you can also test for other privacy leaks at: [https://emailprivacytester.com/](https://emailprivacytester.com/)

Featured in: [http://www.ghacks.net/2014/05/25/test-email-account- privacy-...](http://www.ghacks.net/2014/05/25/test-email-account-privacy- leaks/)

<comment><USER3> The emailleaktest site linked by OP is a word for word down to the privacy policy blatant copy of [http://emailipleak.com](http://emailipleak.com) which we made. Not sure why this is hacker news front page worthy.

<comment><USER4> Wow, it sure is. The subject is HN worthy but I'd hope a moderator would edit the submission to point at your site instead.

And send GoDaddy a DMCA takedown notice for this copycat site. It was just registered a few days ago and given that they shamelessly ripped your content off, I'd have serious reservations about trusting them with my data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Guess it would be worth mentioning how to spoof initial Received header for those who self-host their email and run Postfix as their MSA/MTA: [https://www.void.gr/kargig/blog/2013/11/24/anonymize- headers...](https://www.void.gr/kargig/blog/2013/11/24/anonymize-headers-in- postfix/)

Notice: This works when you have a separate MSA (submission) service listening on a separate port (587 by default), which is a proper approach; not when you send to MTA on port 25.

<comment><USER5> Not like I care about karma, but I see downvotes and I don't know what's wrong with my comment. That makes me curious.

I have a self-hosted email, my MUA machine's IP was logged in headers (and there's no particular reason for it to be there), so I googled for a bit, found a satisfying solution among others, and decided to share it. Is there anything wrong with that?

<comment><USER6> Nope. Maybe someone clicked the wrong button by accident. Or maybe they're just rude. I often find that many of the most interesting comments on this site are the most downvoted, so if I were you I'd take some pride in your downvote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can strip the sender's entire connection from the Headers in the email, and make it look like your SMTP server originated the mail...

With sendmail redefine RECEIVED_HEADER in sendmail.mc: _define(`confRECEIVED_HEADER ',`by $j ($v/$Z)$?r with $r$. id $i; $b')dnl_

I've been using this to get around the spam filters when sending emails to my clients from my residential IP.

[http://www.devside.net/wamp-server/removing-senders-ip- addre...](http://www.devside.net/wamp-server/removing-senders-ip-address-from- emails-received-from-header)

</comment><comment><USER8> If you run a website behind cloudflare it's worth looking into Email IP leaks.

Sometimes simply registering at a website and looking at the registration confirmation email headers can reveal its real IP.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell I don't know if their MTA is currently having problems, but it took my MTA 12 minutes to deliver the message to theirs. When I telnet to them on port 25 the welcome banner doesn't seem to appear.

If they're using some form of artificial delays or greylisting, that's all well and good, but it's not really suitable for this sort of service. I imagine a lot of people would get bored of waiting and just leave.

</comment><comment><USER9> My Thunderbird (v31) appears to leak my IP address ... or is it my Postfix server? anyway, it sounds bad regarding anonymity. Is it a configuration problem? my university lab email service has the same issue, so I guess it's a standard configuration ... ? (my mail server says it's Postfix who handled the mail, the one from the lab doesn't leak that)

<comment><USER10> It is the server by adding the "Received: from ..." header, not Thunderbird fault. It is indeed a standard configuration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You (the person who created this :)) should update the link to the email address to include a target for the mailto: link to a new tab: I use Gmail (for domains) and the mailto link opened in the same window, closing the page (which should stay open, it says).

</comment><comment><USER12> "You are connecting from IP address: 10.56.111.24, 127.0.0.1"

Err, RFC 1918 anyone?

</comment><comment><USER13> So Gmail doesn't leak anything, but a Gmail Apps account does? Anyone know why?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am using a VPN all the time to get some level of privacy, today I was stunned by the amount of information my email client is "sharing" with the rest of the world. Crazy ...

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks like a great way to harvest active email addresses.

<comment><USER15> They'd be breaking the Privacy Policy if they were; [http://emailleaktest.com/privacy.html](http://emailleaktest.com/privacy.html)

<comment><USER16> Oh no, not the Privacy Policy!

Seriously though, the presence of a privacy policy gives little comfort when both the website and the Privacy Policy are very careful not to identify who is hosting that domain with Godaddy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> what's funny about this is that if you use google mail through the web browser, you can't do email signing or encryption, but your IP address isn't visible to the person you send mail to. but, if you use a 3rd party MUA so that you can use signing and encryption, then your IP address is visible.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice try, I'm not going to "leak" my ip to emailleaktest.com. Good effort though.

</comment><comment><USER19> smart way to collect a huge list of valid email. This list is probably worth a bunch of $ .

<comment><USER20> For testing things like this using a throwaway address would appear to be the obvious choice.

<comment><USER21> That's not trivial with my current email provider, which is something I would like to test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Seems to be down or overloaded this morning. After 5 minutes the page did not update for me.

<comment><USER22> I went to breakfast and came back and it had refreshed by then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Spelling mistake spotted; "automaticly" should be "automatically".

<comment><USER23> Spelling mistakes? "Automaticly" is a much better phonetic representation of what is pronounced. What is right is actually wrong! What is wrong is right!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So I have to click a mailto link rather than letting me copy and paste the email address? I don't have a mail client set up on this machine. Good one....

<comment> mike-cardwell I right clicked it and selected "Copy Email Address". In Firefox.

<comment><USER24> Don't make me think... I should be able to copy and paste without any browser tricks or viewing the source.

<comment><USER25> Right click on a link to copy the url or email address is not a browser trick.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Rube Goldberg of Rice - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/07/the-rube-goldberg-of-rice.html <comment><USER2> I spent two years in rural Vietnam setting rice husk on fire. [1]

Here are two pictures if you're curious what they look like in larger quantities (the videos linked in other comments don't show them too well)

[http://ricehusk.cc/goodboiler/day7](http://ricehusk.cc/goodboiler/day7) [http://ricehusk.cc/](http://ricehusk.cc/)

They're a fascinating material, quite unlike anything else in nature.

They've got this really high silica content and unique lattice structure that makes them really tough. They've got a weird particle size/shape, making them fluffy but also with a very high angle of repose (meaning you can pile them up into an almost vertical wall)

Trouble is that it's hard to do anything economically productive with them. Those boats in the picture I linked above float all around the Mekong delta, not all of them dropping of the rice hull to someone that would use it.

I was surprised to see quite big rice hullers (2 stories tall) being operated by a few guys all over rural Cambodia. The big challenge for most people seemed to be financing the _fuel_ not the upfront capital investment of the huller. The most prevalent technology was diesel powered hullers. Some people were piloting gasifiers that would use the rice hulls themselves as fuel.

Anyway, I could go on and on. Very interesting to see someone in the US playing around with this stuff!

[1] [https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/2012/03/08/i_spent...](https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/2012/03/08/i_spent_last_year_making_fire.html)

<comment><USER3> What happened after day 16?

<comment><USER2> The machine worked! We boiled water for a few cups of coffee.

The write up is coming. Eventually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A quick search produces many rice hullers in the $500.00 range. These are made in China and India and other parts of the world which grow a lot of rice on small plots. The inventor claimed not to find any hullers that were affordable.Maybe he didn't use the interweb?

<comment><USER5> $500 is not that affordable, especially given the ability (or lack thereof) to finance it in many parts of India and China. Obviously, this isn't a scalable product for those needs, but its a nice start.

Edit: why the downvotes? Financing a $500 product is a major issue in India, for example, where the cost of capital is extremely high.

<comment><USER6> It's still less than what the inventor came up with, so it seems relevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Related:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Nut_Sheller](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Nut_Sheller)

I saw a documentary on this. The main breakthrough was flipping the sheller upside down, so that the area of the exit was larger than the area of the entrance, which prevented jamming.

Also it's made of concrete so once you have the molds, it can be cast cheaply anywhere in the world.

Previously people spent an alarming amount of time pealing peanuts by hand (especially in Africa, where the peanuts are often eaten raw/sun-dried due to a lack of fuel) and this freed them up for other tasks.

This combined with the rolling water carrier (a plastic barrel flipped on its side with a handle stuck on the ends) has saved countless hours of menial labor. If only we had low tech solutions for first world problems..

</comment><comment><USER8> What separates the rice from the hulls? I get that the rollers crack it open, but then how do they end up in physically different places? The video doesn't show that.

<comment><USER9> This video?

[http://www.brillengineering.com/](http://www.brillengineering.com/)

The feed system drops the rice grains and the hulls past a fan. The fan blows the husks away, the grains drop into your collection bucket.

I'd probably want to enclose that a bit more to collect the husks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good article. It's always cool to see people experimenting.

It seems like wheat or barley or rye would be a lot less trouble though if a grain were needed. You don't have to build a vat for those, nor start them in a greenhouse (in New York) either.

Harvest with a hand sickle and thresh on a tarp with a stick or some numchucks and you are ready to cook and eat.

I guess sashimi with rye might not be the same though.

</comment><comment><USER11> What a good story. A burgeoning market helped along by a kind soul with a love for tinkering.

</comment><comment><USER12> This was a joy to read. A perfect story!

</comment><comment><USER13> I've gotten used to eating Brown rice. When I eat white I just picture my sugar levels spiking.

<comment><USER14> You do know brown rice still has the outer hull removed?

<comment><USER15> i didn't. for me the rice skin was something very soft.

<comment><USER14> Here's a nice little animation showing the difference between unhulled, brown, white, and polished rice.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice#mediaviewer/File:Rice_Ani...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice#mediaviewer/File:Rice_Animation.gif)

<comment><USER16> Nice. But note that you missed a stage. Unhulled, brown, white, and polished correspond to stages A, B, D, and E in the animation respectively. The WP article[1] says C is "rice with germ".

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice)

<comment><USER14> My intent was not to comprehensively describe the graphic, but to give sufficient information to understand why it is relevant.

<comment><USER16> Not a problem. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You should probably have a diet of 95% of things that you can eat raw. I'm not saying you should eat them, just that you could. Think about the things that are good for you. Fish, greens, fruit. They can all be eaten raw. Those you can't are often bad for you. Starchy carbs, etc.

Humans developed before fire. Our intestinal genome is ancient.</comment>


Developing database-driven web applications with Chicken Scheme - <AUTHOR> http://mathieu-desrochers.github.io/Scheme-Experimentations/

<comment><USER2> "You love scheme" _nodding_

"You understand that simplicity is beautiful, and that scheme is the very essence of what it means to write software." _nodding becomes vigorous_

"So we ended up embedding the Chicken Scheme runtime into a FastCGI module..." Wait, what?

</comment><comment><USER3> What about other web servers that have FastCGI support?

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like we have a little Chicken Scheme voting cabal here on HN. Keep them coming!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Shoot, I should've waited a little before posting (it was just posted to r/scheme by the author, didn't realize it was so fresh).

</comment><comment><USER5> Will be interesting to integrate scheme with rack enabled servers.</comment>


Selling Kiko: How Justin Kan sold his first YC startup on eBay - <AUTHOR> http://areallybadidea.com/selling-kiko <comment><USER2> Great story, but I wonder if this is a situation where you 'only hear about the winners'? I'd love to know if anyone has tried something similar on eBay? I suppose the question is this: is eBay really a good market for fledging startups looking to liquidize or was this story one of those million-dollar homepage things?

<comment><USER3> From the post: _We posted the auction on Reddit and, with the help of a few friends, got to the front page. ... Pretty quickly the story was picked up by Techcrunch ..._

This part has got to be important. Getting significant visibility for the auction likely helped quite a bit, and eBay is just a medium that made the auction possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very well written and a lot of informative content!

But I had a question about general solicitation in connection with a private placement? Wouldn't selling your startup (shares) on ebay be in violation of SEC regulations?

<comment><USER5> We actually sold all the assets (which was specified in the auction), not the actual company itself. The assets included the domain, code license and database.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you dont mind me asking, what was eBay's cut of a seemingly large transaction?

It sounds they deserve every penny, for the support and consideration they gave you. (/sarcasm)

<comment><USER5> I think it was around $3500 all told.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome! Do you know if the kiko codebase is still in use?

<comment><USER8> I don't know - they took down the kiko.com site a couple years ago and we haven't heard about it since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats! This is inspiring and motivated my business partner and I to consider selling our mobile app business. We just hit 1 million users across our portfolio of relatively unknown apps.

If we are able to sell our company, we would be able to use the cash to pay for living expenses so we can start another company.

<comment><USER10> Awesome. We're in similar shoes. We should connect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great story! Someone should make an eBay for startups. Does anyone know if one already exists?

<comment><USER12> Yup, flippa.com. It is more for sites than startups.

</comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen Were Kiko's buyers ultimately happy with the acquisition?

<comment><USER5> I don't really know. They never asked for a refund :)

<comment><USER13> have you sold anything on eBay since, or was the rush gone after that :P

Thanks for sharing your story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Practical question - if you guys sold assets only did that qualify you for capital gains on the sale or ordinary income tax?

<comment><USER8> Technically, we didn't sell the assets. The company sold the assets (income), then distributed the resulting cash to shareholders (capital gains). So the money got taxed twice, once for corporate income tax and once as capital gains.

<comment><USER15> So you were structured as C-Corp?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> do you know what the main reason was for them buying the assets? Traffic, Codebase, Domain, YC fame? did you post all your traffic stats on the auction at the time?

<comment><USER5> I asked them how they valued the auction. Response:

\- 50k for the domain name

\- 175k (or so) for two man-years of engineer time and the code

\- 25k for user base

This is all a bit fuzzy and from memory, so I could be somewhat off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Would you guys be really happy to make $258K from a startup sale? I don't think I would be that excited. Once you subtract all the fees, taxes, investors share, you're left with maybe $150K. Then you split it among team members, and you end up with something you can make doing a regular job in like a year.

Yes, it's fun and independent, but I think if you're taking a risk of creating a startup, it should be at least rewarded with a nice sum of money when you sell it.

<comment><USER5> Looking back, of course it isn't a lot of money, especially when you consider how well justin.tv is doing and that we have raised millions in VC since then. However, consider that we were thinking we would get nothing initially and would have been happy to get 50k. And that the whole thing jumped 200k in the course of a few hours. I think you'd be excited too ;)</comment></comment>


Zoom ranked #1 in the App Store in just 90 days - <AUTHOR> https://www.yac.com/blog/remote-apps-arent-just-for-work <comment><USER2> Just wait for the kids to downvote it to hell

<comment><AUTHOR> haha, yeah. There's just a crazy amount of negative things goin on about it on twitter. Hard to tell what criticism has a motive behind it, but still.</comment></comment>


Thor's Stone, Thurstaston Common - <AUTHOR> https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2019/07/28/thors-stone-thurstaston-common/ <comment><USER2> Wow I live just a couple of miles from here, down the road in the next village! I run by this stone a few times a week. It's well-known locally and I think it's mainly pre-teen couples carving their initials in. The rest of the park isn't treated with any disrespect so it's not just people being terrible in general. People keep stealing that brass inscription by it, though, which is a bit more troublesome. That's probably organised metal thieves rather than locals.

The ridge is I think the highest part of the Wirral and has commanding views over the Irish sea and the beginning of the mountains of north Wales, where it's certainly likely people would gather for ceremonies. It feels like a bit of an intersection of England, Ireland, and Wales. But this rock itself is set back from that in a hollow so isn't in as interesting a location.

I proposed to my wife in the country house of which this stone is in the grounds of, too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I grew up in Neston which is about 6 miles away. We used to get there on our bikes along an old dis-used railway line that was converted in to a walking path called the Wirral Way and pretty much allows you to go the whole length of the Wirral (a peninsular of land between the River Dee and the River Mersey), without touching a single road (there's that one quiet road in Heswall...).

You can then come off at points and explore relatively large parks like this one. We had such freedom as young as 11 ranging out and no-one ever new we were out that far.

The whole area of Thurstaston Common for a kid is like a giants playground. You run up and down the rocks, all moulded and curved with the water, the footfalls and general life going on around it. 30 years ago it was covered in graffiti maybe not so much but it was always drawing people there. My Dad went there as a child.

What you can't see from the photos is that you are on a high point looking over the River Dee with it's salt water marsh land, beeches and on the other side is Wales and the mountains with Moel Famau peaking in the distance.

And while the it might the graffiti might not be so great there is a beautiful history to the life spent around it. Not far from there is a vantage point that many Viking coins are found. As if people sat down and they fell out of their pockets. There were Viking longboats unearthed not far to the north.

If you ever get the chance its one of the most beautiful places you'll see in that quiet, reserved kind of a way.

Who ever the said the Commons were a tragedy!

<comment><USER4> A nice 360 pic from the high point I think:

[https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Thor's+Stone,+Thurstasto...](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Thor's+Stone,+email@example.com,-3.13673,3a,75y,182.73h,67.84t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipP6OYTzQwTHMRH4vSDGesAqPjPWrJSKcri2hfSB!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipP6OYTzQwTHMRH4vSDGesAqPjPWrJSKcri2hfSB%3Dw203-h100-k-no- pi-0-ya100-ro-0-fo100!7i10000!8i5000!4m5!3m4!1s0x487b2825c38aa859:0x57a140a43a18a7a8!8m2!3d53.3558153!4d-3.1362426)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An interesting article, I grew up near here and have spent many hours clambering up and over the rock. It's absolutely packed on a sunny day.

Perhaps strangely I feel like the scale of the graffiti makes it better than if there was just a bit. It's not a small blemish, but absolutely part of the rock itself.

</comment><comment><USER5> always heard it referred to as 'Thor's Rock' locally.

I wonder if the name varies by area even within the local vicinity.</comment>


Ask HN: How to find a business partner to bootstrap a startup in France - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys, I have just resigned my role as a Data analyst/Growth hacker at SecretEscapes.com to bootstrap a startup copying a well know UK service in France. This particular company is doing very well in the UK atm and just raised money to expand in the US.
Through my mother Job, I have easy access to a sample of the customer segment targeted to test an MVP and verify if there is indeed a potential opportunity in France for that particular service. The idea is then to test and document from the findings if it is really possible to bootstrap a startup with a proven idea and a group of early adopters using "The Step-by-Step Guide for building a great company" from Steve Blank and Bob Dorf and "The Lean Startup" from Eric Ries. I am thus looking for a business partner (not obviously tech) to help me designing the product, sourcing it, testing it and market it. In short I am looking for an entrepreneur that "doesn't mind getting his hands dirty" who is data driven and understand the lean startup movement. Any help would be really appreciated. <comment><USER2> Hi I like You approach, would like to volunteer and help as much as I can for You to reach MVP and validate France as a market. I am also big believer in execution over idea hence think its great approach, especially that You already got beta testers.

I work on regular job that is very data driven in a large financial corporation, but I want to learn from startups and see if I am good fit so can work afternoons and nights, located in SE Europe. On daily basis I run and govern portfolio north of ~300MEUR, not that much on global scale, but in my country its a lot.

I am proficient in unix/R/SQL/dbases while got some knowledge on JS/HTML/CSS (node, meteor, jekyll) and Ive also read the books You mentioned. I do social marketing and growth hacking as personal project for couple of friends in hospitality business.

So I may be of help with any sort of data, biz dev/ operations, finance/accounting and social media. Can bootstrap and run a website, but do not expect anything extraordinary as its only for MVP level.

Pressure is normal, and I create value in given time, so some things may not be perfect, but I get things done.

Maybe we could just discuss it for 15min? And go from there.

Let me know firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Show HN: HN in Solr with Search, Sentiment Detection, Named Entity Recognition - <AUTHOR> http://search.nagrgtr.com/#/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

its a "small" side Project of me, which belongs to a bigger project I am working on. The side project here is basically a Webscraper with some NLP at the moment, which is accessible via a RESTful interface and an Angular Frontend. Hope you like it. Happy to hear questions and feedback.</comment>


Facebook Graph API v1.0 will be deprecated on April 30, 2015 [FAQ] - <AUTHOR> https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/faq

<comment><AUTHOR> "The list of someone's friends who don't use your app is no longer available in v2.0"

A step in the right direction in terms of user privacy, but sounds like something that will affect a lot of products.</comment>


Mystery of Google's barges is solved - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24842749

<comment><USER2> It's still a little odd to me that such a high level of secrecy was required if all they are doing is creating a couple of party barges.

<comment><USER3> It did end up bringing them even more press coverage</comment></comment>


Finding the Oldest Fossils of Butterflies Using a Human Nose Hair - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/science/fossils-butterflies-moths.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> TL;DR:

"The nose hair has just the right length and springiness for getting a pollen grain, or in this case the butterfly scale, to adhere to it," Mr. van Eldijk said. "I was just provided these by my professor, I don't know whose nose hair it was. It's probably best not to ask."</comment>


How do black holes destroy information and why is that a problem? - <AUTHOR> https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/08/how-do-black-holes-destroy-information.html <comment><USER2> man, watch the PBS YouTube channel SpaceTime. They're short, informative, and very well done. they dedicate a handful of episodes to getting you ready for Hawking radiation.

[https://youtu.be/qPKj0YnKANw](https://youtu.be/qPKj0YnKANw)

<comment><USER3> I love their dedication to building up over multiple episodes instead of dumbing things down every time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The important thing is that all evolution equations that we know of are > time-reversible.

I've heard this before, but it's so surprising to me, when one of the simplest mathematical operations - addition - is not reversible. e.g. if _a+b=4_ , you can't infer the values of _a_ and _b_ (beyond their linear relationship). This non-injectivity is a kind of summarising, with less information, where more than one state maps to one.

So "evolution equations" (reality) are not like addition; state changes never summarise.

<comment><USER5> It is not reversible because you're ereasing information. If you want to have a reversible addition you are not allowed to destroy the information.

The same happens if you apply the standard AND operator to two bits because the output is only one bit, therefore it is impossible to figure out the two input bits. To have a reversible AND operator you can define it like this: f(x1, x2, b) = (x1, x2, b XOR (x1 AND x2)). E.g: f(1,1,0) = (1,1,1). From this output you can get back to the input. This way you can implement a NOT gate as well, and all others gates. At the end you can implement addition using bits and your summation becomes reversible :) You can see that with this definition we are not ereasing any information, hence it becomes reversible.

<comment><USER6> You'd have to do that for all results, not just one. This is basically what an event sourced system does: you store all the events and fold your state, so you can "play back" to any point in time. You could theoretically reverse from the end, but I haven't seen it done.

<comment><USER7> A transactional database would tick that box, events are stored and can rollback to a point in time.

<comment><USER8> Not quite. Dropping a column or updating a row is typically irreversible.

<comment><USER9> In PostgreSQL, schema changes are transactional.

<comment><USER10> > In PostgreSQL, schema changes are transactional.

With a few exceptions (that refuse to run in an explicit transaction): E.g. {CREATE, DROP} DATABASE, {CREATE, DROP} TABLESPACE, {CREATE INDEX, DROP INDEX, REINDEX} CONCURRENTLY, REINDEX {SCHEMA, SYSTEM, DATABASE}.

<comment><USER11> Also, try adding a value to an enum via ALTER TYPE ... ADD VALUE

<comment><USER10> Not anymore ;). Well, at least in the upcoming PG 12.

[https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...](https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=212fab9926b2f0f04b0187568e7124b70e8deee5)

      commit 212fab9926b2f0f04b0187568e7124b70e8deee5
      Author: Thomas Munro <firstname.lastname@example.com>
      Date:   2018-10-09 12:51:01 +1300

          Relax transactional restrictions on ALTER TYPE ... ADD VALUE (redux).

There's still some restrictions:

> This patch removes that restriction, and instead insists that an uncommitted > enum value can't be referenced unless it belongs to an enum type created in > the same transaction as the value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do they destroy information? Last I checked they don't: [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29175/why-is- inf...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29175/why-is-information- indestructible)

Maybe there is some recent development I am not aware of an Susskind is wrong though.

More:

\- [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/450326/why-is- th...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/450326/why-is-the- information-paradox-restricted-to-black-holes)

<comment><USER13> That's why it's a problem — the two best tested laws of physics contradict each other.

<comment><USER12> Which law of physics say information must be lost in a black hole?

AFAIK if information is lost in a black hole it will also violate the second law of thermodynamics - so really you have many many laws saying it cannot be lost - and Hawking temporarily claimed it will be lost in black holes before recanting and saying it won't.

So ... I don't quite follow. I mean this title is as concerning to me as something that claims the earth is flat.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe the 'No-hair theorem' is closest to a 'law' that says Black holes destroy information [1]. If it is true, then when you throw anything into a black hole, information about what you threw in (whether it is a chair, a star, a planet, etc.) is 'lost' as to the outside world they all yield the same observable parameters of the black hole.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No- hair_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hair_theorem)

<comment><USER14> IANAPhysicist, but couldn't information be radiated away? When you have a particle and antiparticle annihilating, the information about what collided and when is carried away by the radiation from that annihilation event; nothing remains at ground zero to be inspected.

As matter traverses the accretion disk and falls towards the event horizon, couldn't information about it be radiated away? As an observer, you could definitely tell whether somebody threw a planet or a planet-sized bunch of paperclips into a black hole by observing the accretion disk as it happened.

<comment><USER15> As it stands, as far as we know, Hawking radiation is completely thermal and random, so as the article states, you can't tell the initial state from the final state even if you collect all the radiation.

> observing the accretion disk

Well that is not part of the black hole now, is it.

<comment><USER12> > As it stands, as far as we know, Hawking radiation is completely thermal and > random

Is it? Can you cite?

IANAP but the best I could find on the matter is:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox)

> There are various ideas about how the paradox is solved. Since the 1997 > proposal of the AdS/CFT correspondence, the predominant belief among > physicists is that information is preserved and that Hawking radiation is > not precisely thermal but receives quantum corrections.

Maybe that is wrong, but not sure what the basis for the claim to the contrary is.

Another citation which speaks to the views of Hawking on the matter:

[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/7/1/203...](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/7/1/203#nj185922bib67a)

> Now if information is really lost down a black hole as Hawking originally > proposed [64], and if the Hawking radiation really has negligible > correlations between what is emitted early and late, then it might be true > that A/4 −tr(ρ ln ρ), suitably regularized, would never decrease. But since > this information-loss proposal has been controversial since near the > beginning [65, 66], and since now even Hawking has given it up [67];

Direct quote from Hawking:

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6193-hawking- concedes...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6193-hawking-concedes- black-hole-bet/#ixzz5xjLC8rNa)

> "If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our > Universe, but in a mangled form, which contains information about what you > were like, but in an unrecognisable state."

<comment><USER15> The reason the black hole information paradox is a paradox is because it presents us with an unresolved contradiction ("There are various _ideas_ about how the paradox is solved"). So there are several theories with try to resolve the contradiction, but they are all competing theories (i.e. physicists do not agree). Also, some of those theories assume Anti-de Sitter space which contradicts the positively mesaures cosmological constant.

So in the sense that before the paradox is resolved, we don't know if the radiation is thermal or not, but the idea of the radiation being thermal was based on the existing bog-standard theory of QM and GR. What is under debate is how that needs to be modified, which we haven't agreed yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This was actually a really accessible description for a layperson. Thank you.

<comment><USER17> > Think of mixing dough. You'll never be able to unmix it in practice. But if > only you could arrange precisely enough the position of each single atom, > you could very well unmix the dough. The same goes for burning a piece of > paper. Irreversible in practice. But in principle, if you only knew > precisely enough the details of the smoke and the ashes, you could reverse > it.

This was a nice description of entropy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is literally what the holographic principle addresses... [https://youtu.be/B2ksDczJOAs](https://youtu.be/B2ksDczJOAs) Leonard Susskind has enough accessible vids and lectures to give a conceptual idea of how it works out.

<comment><USER15> Also see Black hole Firewalls - with Sean Carroll (speaking at 20:25) and Jennifer Ouellette [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8bhtEgB8Mo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8bhtEgB8Mo)

which explains the paradox and several different competing theories at a high level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The other major example of a time-irreversible operation/object is much more mundane: the collapse of a wave function. I've never been able to find a decent layperson's explanation of what the wave function collapse really means, and why physicists seem to have no issue with it being time irreversible but seem quite concerned with black holes

<comment><USER20> It is a problem. Quantum mechanics, as it's normally taught, basically has two components:

1\. Schrödinger's equation, which governs how the wavefunction (or quantum state) evolves in time. This equation is time-reversible: given a state at time t, you can calculate what the state was at time t-T. Technically, that means that the "time evolution operator" is invertible. All the information about the history of how system's state is contained in the present state. No information is ever destroyed.

2\. Observation. A quantum state looks like a_1 * psi_1 + a_2 * psi_2 + ... + a_n * psi_n, where psi_i are all the possible states of the system and a_i are complex numbers called "amplitudes." When you observe a state (I'm obviously leaving out some mathematical details here, so anyone with physics knowledge please forgive me), you observe it to be in one of the possible states, psi_i, with i between 1 and n. The probability of observing it to be in state i is proportional to |a_i|^2. This operation destroys information, because the state collapses to psi_i, and all the amplitudes, a_j, j≠i, are lost. You can no longer reconstruct the previous state of the system.

I think most physicists who "seriously" think about quantum mechanics do not believe that step 2 above actually happens. It is a simplification of a much more complicated process called "decoherence." In order to understand decoherence, you have to change your perspective on what observation means. If you treat the observer as a system governed by Schrödinger's equation, which interacts with the system that's being measured, you find that the observer becomes entangled with the system under observation. The observer ends up in a superposition of states, each of which has observed a different outcome. It appears to each state of the observer as if there has been wavefunction collapse, but there actually is a larger quantum system containing both the observer and thing being observed, in which no information has been lost.

The theory of decoherence and the "many-worlds interpretation" began to be developed in the 1950s by one of Wheeler's students, Everett. Somehow, it hasn't really made it into undergraduate physics yet, and most physicists can get by without thinking too deeply about what observation means. You can do most calculations assuming wavefunction collapse happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Q. At time t1 = 0, we know the _state_ of our system. Then we send a photon into an atom. Assume the atom absorbs the photon by having an electron move to a different energy level.

Some time later, at time t2, the electron returns to where it was and emits a photon. As I understand, t2 - t1 is random, with exponential distribution, and independent of everything else in the universe. So, at time t2, we cannot recover the _state_ at time t1 or even know just when t1 was. That is, the reversible time evolution equation of state at time t2 can't tell us the random time t2 - t1 or t1 so cannot recover the state at time t1 -- at time t2, we just do not know just when or how we got to the state at time t2.

So, the time evolution equation is time reversible but the event of the emission of the photon is not time reversible.

This _thought experiment_ seems to conflict with the OP. Where am I going wrong?

<comment><USER22> You are collapsing the wave function at t1 and t2. At t1 explicitly by stating that the state is known, and by t2 implicitly by defining that you have a defined distance t2- t1.

The emission of an photon at an explicit time t2 is not reversible, the emission of an photon according to the wave function of the atom leads to an photon entangled with the atom and the total has a reversible wave function. (For illustrative purposes, when you measure and you find the photon at a distance (t- t2)*c from the atom, then you will also find the atom in a state that has emitted a photon at t2, no Idea if that is especially illustrative.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> (I am not a physicist.) One thing I've struggled with around black holes is what it means for anything to fall into a black hole.

From a reference frame outside the black hole, observing an object falling into the black hole, don't we observe time slowing down as the object approaches the event horizon? In this reference frame, does it ever cross the event horizon, or does it just asymptotically approach it? If it doesn't cross the event horizon, how can anything ever fall into the black hole?

(From the reference frame of the object falling into the black hole, my understanding was that the event horizon shrinks away from you as you approach it.)

Please correct/inform me!

<comment><USER24> (also not a physicist) I think you're correct that objects falling into a black hole never cross the event horizon from our reference frame, but at the same time the light from the object red shifts towards zero energy as it approaches the event horizon as well.

<comment><USER23> Thanks!

Does the fact that the light red shifts towards zero energy mean that the information has been lost, or just that you can't observe it _at_the_moment_?

If the black hole then shrinks due to Hawking radiation, what happens to the object that _never_quite_fell_into_ the black hole?

If it hasn't yet fallen into the black hole, presumably its light becomes slightly-less-red-shifted once more, meaning that you can observe its information again?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Isn't this resolved by the holographic principle? ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle))

<comment> GuB-42 Yes, but it introduces other problems. And most importantly, it hasn't been successfully tested yet.

<comment><USER26> Are there even proposed experiments to test this?

My layman understanding of the Holographic Principle is an object falling into a blackhole has it's 3D information copied onto a 2D surface/perimeter (event horizon) and that 2D information can tell us everything about the energy that continues to exist within the 3D volume of the blackhole.

Fractal Mathematics suggests it is possible right? In other words we can infinity extend the perimeter of a shape while maintaining the same volume, but what are the proposed experiments, if any, to observe this phenomena in nature for quanta?

<comment><USER27> The Holographic Principle shares with String Theory the problem that it is a generic name for a huge number of theories, some that have been falsified already, some practically impossible to test, and some just out of reach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> She also has a music video about Schrödinger's cat: [https://youtu.be/I_0laAhvHKE](https://youtu.be/I_0laAhvHKE)

</comment><comment><USER29> Simple: the laws of most physics say you can look at something now and work it backwards. Once it falls into a black hole the previous state of what falls into it isn't able to be derived from working backwards because it just fell into a black hole. This isn't rocket science! (Maybe eventually though)

<comment><USER30> _... because it just fell into a black hole_

That doesn't really explain anything.

<comment><USER29> I said simply!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Perhaps this is why we perceive time to be going in one direction. The fact that a black hole exists in our universe means that there is only that direction.

</comment><comment><USER32> To save you the read, the summation is in the second-to-last paragraph:

> _As you have probably noticed, I didn't say anything about information. > That's because really the reference to information in "black hole > information loss" is entirely unnecessary and just causes confusion. The > problem of black hole "information loss" really has nothing to do with just > exactly what you mean by information. It's just a term that loosely speaking > says you can't tell from the final state what was the exact initial state._

<comment><USER33> I think the article is already quite concise. Moreover it is nicely written and explains a current open problem in physics from first principles.

A summary like this is useful if the underlying article is bloated and clickbait-y but in this case potentially detracts a reader from a good article.

As featured on the front page a few days ago [1]: knowledge without understanding is meaningless.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/24/dougla...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/24/douglas- adams-was-right-knowledge-without-understanding-is-meaningless)

<comment><USER34> It's the opposite of well written and concise! The writing style is very much like someone talking, full of sentences that are too long or too short.

<comment><USER35> That's because it's a direct transcript of the Youtube video above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> mv universe.info /dev/null

i see no issues there

</comment><comment><USER37> A black hole is not a singularity. If that were true, they would ALL emit the same Hawking radiation pattern.

</comment><comment><USER38> She must be a teacher at Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.</comment>